I’ll be conducting a master class for StoryStudio Chicago in late September. The seminar will take place via Zoom, and the enrollment is limited to thirty participants. It’s a paid class. If you’re interested, you can read a little more about it and register at the StoryStudio website. Here’s the description:

How can a character be made to seem fully human, human in a way that somehow reaches beyond the page, causing our own humanity to reverberate in sympathy? How can a work of fiction, whether long or short, generate enough space inside itself not only for its characters but for us, its readers, allowing us to feel that we’re conducting our own lives there?

These questions are partially a matter of craft, partially a matter of art or philosophy, but since disentangling the practical from the aesthetic is nearly impossible, in this seminar we will explore them from both directions at once. We’ll discuss how characters can be made to possess not only a horizontal life but a vertical life—which is to say not only the social and sensory ties that are the basic plane upon which fiction takes place but also some upward connection, however momentary, to the profound, the sacred, or the mysterious. A lifetime of reading has taught me that even a sentence of such vertical experience can make a tremendous difference in my feeling of connection to a story.

I’ll clarify these ideas by drawing on examples from the fiction that has mattered the most to me, as well as from my own life and, with luck, yours. There will be time for questions and conversation at the end of the seminar.